Teaching Materials Using Katakana for Hearing-Impaired Children in Junior High School English Lessons: To Promote Language-Use Activities of Listening and Speaking

Abstract

This paper reports two-year practitioner research conducted at a school for the deaf. By making teaching materials that contain English sentences with katakana written above them in order to show their pronunciations, the second author attempted to promote language-use activities of listening and speaking. In Period 1 (July 2021 to September 2021), he started to create the teaching materials using katakana but wondered whether hearing-impaired students and teachers really needed them. The results of questionnaires showed that the need for them high. With the help of volunteers, he created teaching materials for Grades 7 to 9. In Period 2 (September 2021 to March 2023), the second author conducted and improved English lessons using the katakana teaching materials. By changing the teaching procedures as well as using the katakana teaching materials, he was successful in increasing the time for listening and speaking. In Period 3 (April 2023 to July 2023), based on the suggestions made by the first author, the second author further tried to make activities more communicative. The analyses of lessons suggest that the students expressed their ideas more often and had more chances to listen to the teacher’s ideas. Overall, katakana teaching materials were found to be effective in promoting language-use activities of listening and speaking and in facilitating students’ motivation.